![]() ![]() Second, Demos argues, the witch-hunting impulse comes from within the human psyche. That inward-looking impulse distinguishes witch-hunting from discrimination, which marginalizes the “other”: the Jew, the black, the Muslim. First, witch-hunters accuse people within their own communities. ![]() “The enemy within” is a double entendre, deftly summarizing Demos’s two main theses. In his latest book, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World, Demos uses insights from history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis to trace the common themes that, he says, characterize witch hunts. ![]() It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” Demos does not believe in karma, however. He discovered himself to be a direct descendant of John Putnam Sr., progenitor of the witch-hunting Massachusetts Putnams. “I literally jumped up from my seat and looked for a Putnam genealogy, and I traced the line right through,” says Demos, now the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale. “Witchcraft involves projection from the enemy within to the supposed enemy without.” ![]()
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